Invited Talk Preview: “Superscaling Performance through Energy-Efficient Supercomputing” by Vanderbilt’s Padma Raghavan

SC Insider
Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:55:26 +0000
SC18, ACM, energy-efficient supercomputers, graph algorithms, IEEE, linear algebra, NIST, Padma Raghavan, Roadrunner, SIAM, Summit, superscaling performance, Vanderbilt University

Speaker: Padma Raghavan

Time: Thursday, November 15th from 11:15am – 12pm

Location: Exhibit Hall B

Abstract:

In June 2008, Roadrunner sped past the 1 petaflop/s milestone, clocking in at 1.026 petaflops/s. Ten short years later in June 2018, Summit has now taken over the as the world’s fastest supercomputer spot by achieving 122.3 petaflops/s. What is remarkable is that the over 100x scaling up of performance was achieved with less than 4x scaling of hardware power. In this talk, I will highlight the key advances in energy-efficiency that made possible this superscaling of performance with a particular focus on the influence of linear algebra and graph algorithms. I will also speculate on trajectories for their continued development to meet the demands of data centric computing as we face slow-downs in reducing the power consumption of transistors.

About the Speaker:

Padma Raghavan

Padma Raghavan is the Vice Provost for Research and Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining Vanderbilt in 2016, she served as the Associate Vice President for Research and Strategic Initiatives, as the founding Director of the university-wide Institute for CyberScience and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University.

Raghavan specializes in high performance computing and its applications with a particular focus on the scalability of algorithms that operate on very large data sets including sparse graphs and matrices. She has supervised many MS and PhD theses and authored over one hundred peer-reviewed publications in three areas: scalable parallel computing; energy-aware supercomputing; and computational modeling, simulation and knowledge extraction.

Raghavan is also active in the profession. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation, the National Academies Panel on Review of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the governing Council of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics), was the Chair of the Technical Program of the 2017 IEEE/ACM Conference on Supercomputing.

Raghavan received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award and the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Distinguished Scholar award from the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory, in recognition of her contributions to scalable parallel computing. She was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in 2013 for contributions to robust scalable sparse solvers and energy-efficient parallel scientific computing.